The Liminal Space between Imprisonment and Freedom:

This paper aims to study The Shell (2008) by the Syrian writer MustafaKhalifa. It analyzes the physical as well as the psychological traumasuffered by the protagonist Musa, who was imprisoned for fourteenyears without knowing the cause of his imprisonment. After studyingfilm in Paris, a Catholic student Musa returns to his homeland,Syria, and upon landing at the airport, he is unjustly arrested. Heis mistaken for a radical Islamist and is imprisoned with detaineeswho were either with or suspected of being affiliated with the MuslimBrotherhood. He is locked up without trial in Tadmur under Basharal-Assad’s regime. Tadmur has been called the “absolute prison” bydissident Yassin al-Haj Salih and the “kingdom of death and madness”by Syrian poet Faraj Bayraqdar. Musa remains oblivious to the crimehe has been charged with until just before his impending release. Fromthe very beginning, his life is endangered not only by the harshness ofdaily torture and humiliation but also by the Islamist extremists in hisconfinement who deem him deserving of execution as an unbelieverdue to his Catholic faith. He faces exclusion because others perceivehim as impure. This isolation is enforced not just by the jailers butalso by his fellow prisoners, mirroring the suppression experienced byseveral political detainees who made their way through Tadmur andother prisons in Syria and were unable to share their suffering. Thepaper argues that Musa is trapped in a liminal space, that is, he isphysically released but has never truly been released, and thus is avictim of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) suffering emotionalnumbing.